According to news reports, the
Detroit public school district may have illegally spent more than a quarter of a
billion dollars of business property taxes that it had no right to collect. To
even begin to repay that money, the district would likely have to levy a new tax
on all taxpayers, including the ones it allegedly overtaxed in the first place.
That’s not just robbing Peter to pay Paul. It’s robbing Peter and Paul to
pay Paul.

To those who have watched in
despair as every effort to turn the district around has ended in Shakespearian
tragedy, I offer this proverb: When the horse you’re riding is dead, get off.

The Detroit district is a dead
horse.

This sounds harsh, but imagine
for a moment that Michigan’s 2000 school voucher initiative had passed, operated
smoothly for five years — and was suddenly found to have perpetrated this
quarter-billion-dollar fiasco. The program would have been killed.

But after a decade of fiscal
mismanagement that has made the Prodigal Son look like Warren Buffett, the
Detroit public school system may once again get a pass from voters and community
leaders. There will naturally be some token beating of this obviously dead
horse; some jangling of its reins; some topping-up of its feed bag. But few will
suggest getting off.

There are other horses in the
stable. If Michigan were to pass a strong parental choice program, such as the
education tax credits proposed by the Mackinac Center and others, independent
schools would come within reach of every family. But that would take time. When
children’s futures are on the line, impatience is a virtue.

Fortunately, there is an
immediate solution: a full-scale, privately financed scholarship program for the
children of Detroit. Businesses, foundations and individuals can contribute to a
fund that provides private school tuition assistance to every family in the city
who needs it.

Michigan is already home to at
least four nonprofit private scholarship programs, so we don’t have to reinvent
the wheel. Among these are a Detroit chapter of the national Children’s
Scholarship Fund, managed by the
Catholic Archdiocese (but not restricted to its own schools), and the Grand
Rapids-based
Education Freedom Fund, which now serves children primarily outside of
Detroit. Both programs are heavily oversubscribed, currently having between two
and four times as many applicants as scholarships. Either or both of these
programs could be radically expanded to serve all of Detroit, or they could be
used as models for a new, independent organization.

The advantages of this approach
are obvious: instant results, no politics, no red tape. But could enough money
be raised to make a real difference?

As of 2002, Michigan nonprofits
were spending
$28 billion annually, 95 percent of which remained within the state.
Michigan’s foundations alone made annual grants of $1.2 billion. If the private
scholarships were capped at the lower of $3,000 or 75 percent of tuition,
roughly $440 million would be required to award a scholarship to every single
DPS student. Even with higher caps, it is feasible.

A well-funded Detroit scholarship
program would not only create the most vibrant and responsive education
marketplace in the nation, but also have the likely benefit of lowering taxes —
both features that would attract new jobs and businesses to the state. The tax
benefit would accrue from the fact that the state government finances school
districts based largely on their enrollment. If a well-funded Detroit
scholarship program were a success with parents — as it almost certainly would
be — students would voluntarily migrate out of the DPS and into private-sector
schools, reducing the school district’s budget and its seemingly insatiable
appetite for tax dollars.

The only thing standing in the
way of this solution is our blinkered vision of what public education must
look like. State-run schooling has been around for so long that few people can
imagine anything taking its place, no matter how bad it gets. We have even lost
sight of the distinction between the institution itself and the mission it is
meant to fulfill, confusing one particular means — the current education
monopoly — with our ultimate end: ensuring that all of Detroit’s children are
prepared for success in private life and participation in public life.

Because of that confusion, we are
unnecessarily sacrificing generation after generation of this city’s children to
a system that is nearly bankrupt in every sense of the word. But Detroit doesn’t
have to keep its children shackled to the remains of the public school system.
There is a better option. All you have to do to make it happen is pick up the
phone and donate to a scholarship fund. I have.

#####

Andrew J. Coulson is senior
fellow in education policy for the Mackinac Center for Public Policy, a research
and educational institute headquartered in Midland, Mich. Permission to reprint
in whole or in part is hereby granted, provided that the author and the Center
are properly cited.